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More calls for results in Zimbabwe as farm
invasions, disorder continue

International Herald Tribune

The Associated PressPublished: April 9,
2008

HARARE, Zimbabwe: International calls for Zimbabwe's
Robert Mugabe to release long-delayed results from a presidential vote
mounted Wednesday, as ruling party militants continued to overrun
white-owned farms and the opposition accused the government of waging a
campaign of violence.

It has been 11 days since Zimbabweans voted for
president but no official results have been released. The opposition claims
that it won the March 29 vote outright and is asking a High Court judge to
force publication of the tally. Hearings were to continue
Wednesday.

Meanwhile, a state-controlled newspaper claimed that Mugabe's
opponent was "begging" for the post of vice president — stepping up a push
to depict his party as ready to concede.

Morgan Tsvangirai asked for
the vice presidency in a government of national unity "after being told by
his advisers that a possible runoff with President Mugabe for the top job
was not in his best interests," The Herald newspaper reported.

The
opposition has repeatedly dismissed claims that it is seeking a unity
government as lies spread by a government propaganda campaign. On Tuesday,
the secretary-general of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change,
Tendai Biti, said it was "rubbish, rubbish, rubbish."

"We won this
election," he said. The opposition maintains that it won the vote outright,
with no need for a runoff.Australia's government appealed Wednesday for the
quick release of results, following on similar calls by the United Nations,
Britain, the European Union and the United States.

"There is simply
no excuse for them being withheld more than a week after the poll,"
Australian Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said in a statement.

"There are
mixed signals from the Zimbabwe government on the next steps but all appear
to add up to a lack of respect for the will of the people," he
said.

Mugabe, who has led Zimbabwe for 28 years with an increasingly
dictatorial regime, has virtually conceded that he did not win and already
appears to be campaigning for an expected runoff against Tsvangirai by
intimidating his foes and fanning racial tensions.

Zimbabwe's
opposition has accused Mugabe of an orchestrated campaign of violence and of
unleashing ruling party militants to drive dozens of white farmers off their
land.

Biti said there had been "massive violence" since the elections in
traditional ruling party strongholds that voted for the opposition. Ruling
party militants, used previously to intimidate government opponents, were
being rearmed, he said.

Government officials said there had been no
outbreak of violence.

Reports that people are being beaten up and their
homes torched have circulated in the capital in recent days but could not be
confirmed because of the danger of traveling to the areas.

Zimbabwe's
commercial farmers union has said ruling party supporters have forced dozens
of white farmers off their land. Such seizures started in 2000 as Mugabe's
response to his first defeat at the polls — a loss in a referendum designed
to entrench his presidential powers.

Several farmers reached by The
Associated Press said the invasions of their land continued overnight
Tuesday. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were worried
about recrimination.

Mugabe's party has called for a re-count and a
further delay in the release of results.

The opposition has urged the
international community, and African leaders in particular, to try to
persuade Mugabe to step down.

Jacob Zuma, the leader of South Africa's
governing African National Congress party, repeated earlier entreaties that
"results be announced as a matter of urgency," spokeswoman Jessie Duarte
said Wednesday. She cautioned however, that he has made no specific appeal
to the government.

Tsvangirai floats unity Zimbabwe government on
Africa tour

Monsters and Critics

Apr 9, 2008, 8:03 GMT

Johannesburg - Zimbabwe's
opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader Morgan Tsvangirai on
Wednesday indicated he was open to the formation of a unity government with
elements of President Robert Mugabe's Zanu-PF party.

Speaking to
South African radio from Botswana where he held talks with President Seretse
Ian Khama, Tsvangirai said that, once Zimbabwe's election standoff was
resolved, 'we must move towards forming a government that has space for
everyone.'

Such a government would be a 'more inclusive government that
is not exclusive to just MDC,' he said.

Asked what role 84-year-old
Mugabe would have in such a formation Tsvangirai, 56, said that 'would be
subject to discussion' but he thought Zimbabwe's leader of the past 28 years
should retire.

Tsvangirai is on a tour of African countries to court
support for his declaration of victory over Mugabe in March 29 elections. On
Monday he met with the president of South Africa's ruling African National
Congress, Jacob Zuma.

The official results of the presidential vote
have yet to be announced 11 days later.

The High Court in Harare was
due to sit Wednesday to consider the MDC's urgent application for a court
order forcing the state- controlled Zimbabwe Electoral Commission to release
the results.

'I don't think it augurs very well,' Zuma said in an
interview with South Africa's state SABC broadcaster Tuesday when asked
about the delayed results.

Tsvangirai claims he won outright with
50.3 per cent of the vote but a non-profit election observation organization
estimated that, based on a sample of the results, neither he nor Mugabe took
more than the 50 per cent plus one vote needed to avert a second
round.

Mugabe's Zanu-PF party is demanding a recount of the vote and is
also challenging its defeat in elections to the 210-seat House of Assembly
(lower house of parliament).

Tsvangirai rejected a scenario where
Mugabe would remain on as president and the opposition, which won 109 of the
210-seats in the House of Assembly, would control parliament.

Mugabe,
in that case, would be a 'lame-duck president,' said Tsvangirai. 'I think it
would be a constitutional crisis.'

Tsvangirai urges regional
leaders to avert Zimbabwe chaos

Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai said on
Wednesday he would use an ongoing series of meeting with southern African
leaders to urge them to help prevent Zimbabwe from sliding towards
chaos.

"I will be going around the countries in the region to make that
point that it does not need that political chaos and dislocation" on their
doorstep, Tsvangirai said in an interview with South Africa's SABC public
radio, conducted after he held talks in Botswana with President Ian
Khama.

A spokesman for Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change party
said that he would also travel to Zambia and Mozambique, which neighbour
Zimbabwe, as part of a diplomatic drive following elections on March 29.

Mbeki, Tsvangirai talks ‘not on the diary’

The Times, SA

Sapa
Published:Apr 09, 2008There are no immediate plans for a meeting between
President Thabo Mbeki and the leader of Zimbabwe’s Movement for Democratic
Change (MDC), Morgan Tsvangirai, the presidency said
today.

"I know nothing about it," presidential spokesman Mukoni
Ratshitanga replied when asked whether a meeting between the two was on the
cards.

Business Day reported today that MDC secretary-general Tendai
Biti had said Tsvangirai was expected to meet Mbeki "soon" over the Zimbabwe
Electoral Commission’s failure to release the results of the country’s
recent presidential election.

It also quoted sources as saying
Tsvangirai and Mbeki communicated about the election crisis telephonically
last week.

However, Ratshitanga pointed out that, on Wednesday, Mbeki
was in India, leading a South African delegation at the heads and State and
Government session of the inaugural Africa-India Partnership Summit in New
Delhi.

"I have seen nothing of the sort in the diary," he said of any
planned meeting between Mbeki and Tsvangirai.

The MDC is claiming
that the delay in releasing the results is a ploy by President Robert Mugabe
to rig the election, which Tsvangirai maintains he has won.

Is the situation in Zim not a crisis?

The ongoing political
crisis in Zimbabwe will not feature on the official agenda when MPs from 140
countries gather in Cape Town next week for the annual meeting of the Inter
Parliamentary Union.

Briefing members of the SA National Editors'
Forum on Tuesday, Speaker of the National Assembly Baleka Mbete said the
situation in Zimbabwe "cannot be compared with the deteriorating
humanitarian situation in other parts of the world".

She
specifically mentioned Darfur, which has been placed on the agenda by the
South African delegation, and the ongoing conflict between Israel and the
Palestinians, which the Egyptian delegation has put forward for
discussion.

Mbete downplayed the
unresolved electoral impasse in Zimbabwe and denied that the situation posed
a threat to parliamentary democracy in the region and therefore deserved
particular attention.

This is despite Movement for Democratic
Change leader Morgan Tsvangirai calling on regional leaders to intervene in
the crisis and not "wait for dead bodies".

Mbete insisted that
she will not place Zimbabwe on the agenda before she has been briefed by
South African members of the Southern African Development Community observer
team.

"As of this morning (Tuesday), I have not been briefed," she
said.

South African members of the SADC mission returned to the
country on Sunday when their Zimbabwean accreditation expired, but in a
preliminary statement released earlier, the delegation declared the
elections to be a "peaceful and credible expression of the will of the
people of Zimbabwe".

While initial results show the MDC to have
stripped the ruling Zanu-PF of its parliamentary majority, the results for
the presidential election had yet to be released - 11 days after polling
closed.

Democratic Alliance MP Dianne Kohler-Barnard - a member of
the SADC observer group - meanwhile distanced her party from the mission's
initial observations and instead issued a minority report claiming that
almost all the SADC principles governing free and fair elections had been
transgressed.

Mbete did point out that international delegations
could ask for items to be placed on an "emergency agenda" on the first day
of the Inter Parliamentary Union (IPU) session, which starts on Sunday when
about 1 000 delegates gather under the theme "Pushing Back the Frontiers of
Poverty".

But she expressed doubt that the Zimbabwe issue would
feature ahead of "other pressing issues".

However, with both
Britain and the United States participating this year - and both being
outspoken critics of President Robert Mugabe - the issue might be raised
during a general debate on "the political, economic and social situation in
the world" scheduled for the third session of the conference.

The United States will be participating for the first time in 15 years,
having settled its previously withheld membership fees.

Speakers at
the gathering will include Mbete - who will chair this 118th session -
President Thabo Mbeki, outgoing IPU president Pier Fernando Cassini from the
Italian parliament and United Nations deputy secretary-general Asha-Rose
Migiro.

Other subjects for debate will include: "the role of
parliaments in striking a balance between national security, human security
and individual freedoms and in averting the threat to democracy;
parliamentary oversight of state policies on foreign aid; and migrant
workers, people trafficking, xenophobia and human rights".

On
national-security issues, Mbete alluded to a divide between developed and
developing countries, with the former focusing on terrorism and the latter
preferring to look at how human insecurity affects the world's
poor.

"This is not to say that issues of terrorism are not
important," she added.

The IPU, which was established in 1889
by MPs from Britain and France as a forum for parliamentary dialogue, has
its headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland.

This is the first time
that it will meet in South Africa.

This article was originally
published on page 5 of The Star on April 09, 2008

"We managed to remove all the
invades from the occupied farms after realising that they were now
committing crimes such as looting of farm equipment and produce and
threatening to kill the farm owners," said Tanyanyiwa.

"As of now the
situation is under control and the affected white farmers are
safe."

At Panyanda Farm owned by Graham Richards the invaders
ransacked Panyanda Lodge and tourist booked there scamper to
safety.

The invaders who were moving in truck also threatened to kill
John Bolland the owner of Chidza Farm after he resisted their move to evict
him.

Meanwhile a Zanu-PF politburo member retired army general Vitalis
Zvinavashe yesterday called on all farm invaders to move out of the
farms.

"It is true that blacks need land but we can not take it that
way," said Zvinavashe. "Aim calling all those on farms to leave because we
do not want chaos."

The farm invasions were ignited by
unsubstantiated reports in the government media that white farmers were
returning to their former properties in anticipation of an opposition MDC
victory in elections held on March 29.

Meanwhile in Nyamandhovu in
Matabeleland North, Zanu-PF youth militias and war veterans have beaten up
and tortured up supporters of the opposition MDC and those of independent
presidential candidate Simba Makoni.

Nyamandlovu, 60 km out of the second
city of Bulawayo, falls under Umguza constituency, one of a few
constituencies won by Zanu-PF in Matabeleland North province in the recent
parliamentary elections.

When The Zimbabwe Times visited Nyamandlovu
several MDC activists had deserted their homes and gone into
hiding.

In Sigaba Village the faces of two MDC youths, Lindani Nyoni and
Khayalitsthe Ncube, were swollen. They said they had been beaten up by a
group of Zanu-PF youths on Friday morning.

"We were taking our cattle
to the dip tank early morning on Friday when a group of about 10 Zanu-PF
youths and war veterans ambushed us and beat us up.

"They accused us
of being sellouts for drumming up support for Tsvangirai and the MDC during
the election campaign trail," said Nyoni.

The matter was reported to the
police in Nyamandlovu on Saturday.

A local businessman and former ZIPRA
freedom fighter, Stanley Wolfenden, has fled and gone into hiding in
Bulawayo after the ruling party militia raided and shut down his shop on
Friday. They accused him of drumming up support for Makoni during the
election campaign.

Wolfenden, a former aide to the late Vice President
Joshua Nkomo during the liberation war, accompanied former Home Affairs
Minister, Dumiso Dabengwa, as he campaigned during for Makoni in the run-up
to the 29 March elections.

In the run-up to the elections, Obert Mpofu
who was challenged by a war veteran and former ruling party member, Mark
Mbayiwa, issued a strong warning to his opponents."By standing against
him, you have entered my bedroom," he said.On Friday war veterans also
marched in the streets of Harare and threatened to take up arms if Mugabe
lost the elections to the MDC.

Arrests and threats against
foreign journalists denounced as “anti-democratic”

Reporters without borders

9 April 2008

Reporters Without
Borders today criticised the government’s rough treatment of foreign
journalists covering the country’s disputed elections and deplored the South
Africa deputy foreign minister’s accusation that the foreign media were to
blame for Zimbabwe’s political instability.

"The backers of President
Robert Mugabe are venting their frustration by arresting and hounding those
they wrongly see as enemies of the country,” it said. “We do not understand
why a South African government minister is supporting them when they are
openly flouting the democratic principles South Africa supposedly
incarnates. �Silent diplomacy’ must not amount to automatic
support.”

American reporter Barry Bearak, of The New York Times, and a
British journalist, who have been held in Harare prison since 3 April, were
freed yesterday on bail of 300 million Zimbabwe dollars (US$10,000 at the
official rate, US$69 on the black market), according to their lawyer,
Harrison Nkomo. He said Bearak, 58, was taken to a clinic to treat “back
injuries suffered in a fall,” while the British journalist was ordered to
stay at the British High Commission (embassy).

They were arrested in
a 3 April police raid on the surburban York Lodge hotel, where several
foreign journalists were staying while covering the 29 March elections, and
charged with not having proper accreditation. The attorney-general dismissed
the charges but police refused to free them and the journalists’ lawyers
filed an urgent appeal on 5 April.

Two South African technicians of the
firm Globecast, Sipho Maseko and Abdulla Gaibee, who were installing
satellite equipment to transmit TV images, were also freed yesterday after
10 days in prison charged with “working as journalists without permission.”
Maseko, a diabetic, was hospitalised while in jail. Both were freed on bail
of 200 million Zibabwean dollars each.

Two journalists from the
privately-owned South African station Radio 702, Jean-Jacques Cornish and
Sheldon Morais, were arrested on 4 April as they tried to enter the country
at the Beit Bridge frontier post and their passports seized. They were
interrogated for over three hours and then sent back to South
Africa.

South Africa’s deputy foreign minister, Aziz Pahad, told the
diplomatic corps in a speech on 4 April that foreign media and the
international community were “orchestrating” the destablisation of Zimbabwe
and had unfairly accused Mugabe of wanting to “steal” the elections by
delaying announcement of the results. He said the simultaneous holding of a
presidential and parliamentary vote had simply brought logistical
problems.

Using military intervention to overthrow Mugabe

The First Post

THE
ARGUMENTS FOR

The world owes it to the 3m refugees who have crossed the
Limpopo river from Zimbabwe into South Africa, and others who have fled as
far as Britain. If Mugabe's malignant regime came to an end, the majority
would happily return home.

There's more hope of success if the West
acts quickly. The rule of law and democratic process are not far beneath the
surface in Zimbabwean society. African countries torn apart by prolonged
civil turmoil, such as Uganda or Ghana, typically take several decades to
regain stability.

Intervention has worked in Africa in the past. In 1999,
British forces helped UN peacekeepers re-stabilise Sierra Leone, with a
small (800-man) and relatively low-cost military solution.

The
Zimbabwe military is beatable; economic factors have severely weakened
loyalties. Only the special forces are competent. With more than half the
population now in support of Morgan Tsvangirai's MDC, many soldiers may
refuse to fight to keep Zanu-PF in power.

Unlike Iraq, there's little
danger of sectarian splits. Before Mugabe decimated the Ndebele tribe on
political grounds, there was little history of ethnic
antagonism.

Zimbabwe is an important food source, traditionally known as
'Africa's bread-basket'. Many surrounding countries have a vested interest
in seeing its agricultural economy restored. This will not happen until
genuine farmers return to their land, and Mugabe's political cronies are
kicked off it.

It would benefit trade, allowing both the dismantling
of state controls on commerce and the removal of the limited sanctions
currently affecting Zimbabwe. This would facilitate the restoration of the
economy and stimulate enterprise and foreign investment.

The closing
of the Mugabe chapter in Zimbabwe's troubled history would send a clear
message to other leaders who are tinkering with ideas of so-called
land-reform in their own countries.

THE ARGUMENTS AGAINSTAny
intervention by Britain will be condemned as neo-colonialism and Morgan
Tsvangirai will appear to be a stooge. In any case, like America, Britain is
just too busy elsewhere, with forces overstretched in Iraq and
Afghanistan.

Unlike Sierra Leone in 1999, where it was the government who
asked for help from British paratroopers, intervention would doubtless be
considered an invasion of a sovereign nation by the UN - something they
could not support.

Although they are demoralised, Zimbabwe has a lot of
soldiers. The 40,000 Zimbabwean Army and Air Force troops could be doubled
if paramilitaries, militias and youth cadres were called upon. The police
are highly militarised and all 18 to 24-year-olds perform compulsory
military service. In 2005, the CIA calculated that 2m Zimbabweans were
eligible and fit for service.

Zimbabwe's neighbouring nations won't
help in any intervention themselves, not least because it sets an
uncomfortable precedent for their own countries. African Union nations are
overstretched just providing soldiers for Somalia and Darfur.

Even if
a neighbouring nation saw a reason to tolerate the West launch an incursion
– and it would need to be Mozambique for a sea-borne operation, or South
Africa overland – the terrain of Zimbabwe, especially in the mountainous
north and along the Mozambican border, is well suited to guerrilla
resistance operations.

It will destabilise global security. Covert
political or military activity by the West would divide the continent along
neo-Cold War lines; it's not worth alienating the Africans or the
Chinese.

Like Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Mugabe himself is hard to get at.
He takes stringent security measures at all times. An assassination attempt
would be difficult.

The overthrow - or assassination - of Mugabe
would not necessarily solve the problem: it presupposes that Mugabe is the
source of all tyranny in Zimbabwe. A Zanu-PF successor might continue the
brutal regime.

Independence came too early for Africa

The First Post

Peregrine
Worsthorne

Anti-colonialists got it right in Asia, but about Africa they
have been proved tragically wrong

Self-government is better than good
government". That was certainly the assumption behind the anti-colonial
movement which carried all before it in the second half of the 20th century.
In India (not perhaps in Pakistan) and indeed in Asia generally, that
assumption has proved justified.

Not so in Africa, where self-government
has been a disaster. Not just in Zimbabwe but in Tanzania, Kenya, Ghana,
Nigeria and Uganda. Only South Africa escaped but this is largely due to the
presence of Mandela.

In other words, British Africa, unlike Asia, was not
ready for self-government. The colonial power should have stayed on for at
least another 50 years.

This was very much Prime Minister Harold
Macmillan's view. During the Salisbury (now Harare) stopover of his 'wind of
change' tour of British Africa, I remember him musing over a whisky and soda
that the Africans were "pushing us out just at the very moment when
Britain... has the necessary money, resources, know-how and willpower ­
which we never had between the wars ­ to make colonialism work".

In
those days, Aids, was a scourge of the future. But bearing in mind
Macmillan's words, it is painful to speculate about what a colonial
administration could and would have done to control it, not to mention all
the other things it could and would have done by now really to make poverty
history in Africa.

As it was, Britain's final gesture ­ welcomed
enthusiastically by all the anti-colonialists ­ was to hand over power on a
plate to Robert Mugabe. Anti-colonialists got it right in Asia, but about
Africa they have been proved tragically wrong.

Sifting Through the Ashes

WASHINGTON--Robert Mugabe's defeat in the recent
elections in Zimbabwe is the beginning of the end for that country's
octogenarian tyrant. Although the government claims that opposition leader
Morgan Tsvangirai fell short of the 50 percent threshold needed to avoid a
runoff election, only a massive fraud in the second round followed by a
brutal clampdown on demonstrators will keep the man who has governed that
country for three decades in power for a little longer.

Joseph
Conrad could have been describing Mugabe's regime when the character Marlow,
in Heart of Darkness, said about an ivory company: "reckless without
hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage." Many lessons
can be learned from Mugabe:

The first is that, to a large extent,
African anti-colonialism degenerated into a mixture of racism, Marxism and
populism to become something akin to the exploitation it had risen against.
Of all the colonial-era guerrillas who became masters of their countries
after independence, Mugabe was among the worst. His first few years were
misleadingly reasonable--he stood for reconciliation, private property and
mature relations with the outside world. Only when he was challenged
politically did he begin to cloak his tyranny with the ideological
"respectability" of socialism and nationalism. Whether it was the massacre
of thousands of people from the Ndebele tribe in the 1980s or, in this
decade, the violent campaign of land expropriations against whites--most of
whom had acquired their land in the open market by then--Mugabe's
denunciation of a neocolonial war of aggression against his country was a
perfectly calculated chicanery aimed at justifying his
villainy.

The second lesson is that ... it is very hard for
one country to learn the lessons of another. When, in October 2001, Mugabe
took Zimbabwe back to Marxist socialism, countries like Tanzania had already
become failures following that same script. Conversely, neighboring Botswana
had become a success story by building a democracy under the rule of law
based on some aboriginal traditions and by letting free commerce regenerate
a country that in 1965 had been the third poorest in the
world.

The third lesson is that, pan-African protestations
notwithstanding, Africans oppressed by other Africans should expect little
solidarity against their dictators from the rest of the region. For years, a
group of governments led by South Africa legitimized Mugabe's atrocities.
President Thabo Mbeki and 13 other southern African leaders whitewashed the
rigged election of 2002, adding insult to the injury suffered by thousands
of opposition supporters who were murdered, beaten or, under an urban
planning scheme called Operation Restore Order, expelled from their houses
and businesses.

The final lesson is that there is no permanent
guarantee that a region will not relapse into despotism or economic misery.
In the last decade, it had become customary for world opinion to praise the
political and economic progress made by African nations. Some of the praise
was justified, but many countries have slipped back into authoritarianism.
Nigeria's government rigged the 2007 elections and earlier this year Kenya's
despot refused to accept his defeat. Both countries had been hailed as
models of political transition--Nigeria because of its 1999 constitution
that paved the way for civilian rule, and Kenya because opposition leader
Mwai Kibaki was able to win the elections and become president after
President Daniel arap Moi stepped down in 2002.

It is a testament
to the courage of Zimbabwe's Movement for Democratic Change and of its
leader, Tsvangirai, that Mugabe's ZANU-PF party was defeated in the recent
parliamentary elections and that the dictator himself was beaten in the
presidential election. Many a challenger would have given up in the face of
such overwhelming power. It is by no means certain that Tsvangirai will be
tolerant, fair and neutral if he becomes president. But Zimbabwe's No. 1
priority is to throw the tyrant from power and dismantle the horrific
security apparatus whose members are known as "securocrats." Tsvangirai
seems for now the best hope for that to happen.

The great challenge,
once Mugabe leaves power, will be to break the cycle of tyranny by placing
strong limits on the next president. That will entail an act of extreme
sacrifice by the next president--reining in his own powers as the new master
of a country that has no institutions worthy of that name. In that sense,
the real enemy is not Mugabe but a legacy of political
barbarism.

Alvaro Vargas Llosa, author of Liberty for Latin
America, is the director of the Center on Global Prosperity at the
Independent Institute.

Open etter to Simba Makoni and his spokesman, Denford Magora

Hi Denford,

It is quite interesting to note that finally, after
his long deafening silence, Dr. Makoni will be speaking. He has been as silent
as the defeated Mugabe himself! The world will be listening attentively to what
he will be saying at the press conference..

However, if you guys start to come up with
ridiculous pre-conditions, you will have lost the plot. MDC will win a fair
rerun with or without Simba's support, you should know that by now. The worst
those less than 10% (if results from the black market are anything to go by) who
voted him can do is to boycott the rerun but they won't be gaining anything out
of that. Their conscience won't allow them to vote for ZANU PF. Simba must now go all the way with MT
and his political glory may be salvaged. Remember that MT will have to appoint
33 senators according to the stupid current Constitution. This is where moderate
leaders will get a new lease of life, Makoni included. But I warn you, if you
come up with too many preconditions as if you had an upper hand, people will
simply reject that and Simba's political career will come to an abrupt end. Use
this opportunity wisely. I know for certain that you, Denford Magora, from our
previous debates, well before Simba gave you a job, have always had your own
misgivings about Tsvangirai but unfortunately, he is the people's choice at the
moment, not necessarily the best leader. We must respect that if we give a toss
about democracy. The new Zimbabwe needs people like Simba (of course not the
failed rocket scientist) but you have to be careful not to miss an opportunity.
Simba does not have a single seat in parliament, neither in the senate, the 10
that some people often refer to (including political prostitute Jonathan Moyo),
are for MDC and we all know where MDC is coming from. Listen to your conscience
when you make your judgement in the coming few days. MT has always said a new
Constitution is his top priority so I see no reason why anybody should give that
as a condition for any discussion, you are preaching to the repented. Let's be
man enough and start working towards rebuilding Zimbabwe together. Trivial
squabbles must be left to ZANU PF thugs. Simba has shown that he can rise above
the politics of thuggery by deserting the sinking ship and challenging the
captain so it is now time for him to be with the people. Lastly,I suggest you
change Dr. Makoni's e-mail address to reflect the reality on the ground.

I would appreciate your response.

P/S When Simba joined the fray, I sent him a
congratulatory e-mail which he responded to immediately. In that email, I
challenged him to work with the rest of
the democratic forces. I want to remind him the same thing today.